Artist, James Casebere: This particular image actually embodies several different architectural styles. I wanted the hill just because I was thinking about Brooklyn and some of the brownstones. I wanted the yards, the little front yards because I was thinking about Baltimore. And I wanted the little peaked roofs because I was thinking about the Colonial motif or the Cape Cod.
This is a tabletop model that's about 36 inches wide and 24 inches deep. The houses are maybe 8 inches tall, at most. They’re all built out of foam core and plaster and mat board. It's an all white model. It's photographed in black and white. I used little lights on the interior of the houses, and then spot lit one of them, shot it from above to look as if it might be a search light on the house. And you might be viewing the neighborhood from a helicopter, let's say.
You know, it's this notion of suspended disbelief. That the viewer looks at something, recognizes it as a model, but feels like it's real. I wanted to make pictures that had an emotional impact, but that allowed the viewer to sit back and think about their constructed nature and the way in which we construct the world around us-literally or you know, intellectually.
It to me has a fairly ominous feeling. There’s an air of surveillance-a kind of weird combination of bleakness about the place; and sense of danger and conflict and confinement. What I described initially was fairly lightweight and almost, it was like, you know, “happy architecture,” the post modern pastiche of styles. But the mood depicted is one that is a bit more grim. I was, I think always trying to combine these two elements of sort of humor and horror.